INDIRA   BY SAGARIKA GHOSE

                                                                                                                                      

Indira Gandhi by Sagarika Ghose ; Published by Juggernaut ; Pages  342 ; Price Rs.699/-

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Sagarika Ghose was approached by Juggernaut to prepare  a biography of Indira Gandhi, in the centenary year of her birth, 'to bring Indira alive for a new generation'. The Centenary is the appropriate moment to unravel the many layers that defined the former Prime Minister’s personality and create a portrait of her in the context of present-day realities.

Ghose is a  Rhodes Scholarship who  has worked in several papers and was prime time anchor  in CNN-IBN  She is the daughter of Bhaskar Ghose, erstwhile Director General of Doordarshan and wife of Rajdeep Sardesai. She has attracted almost  continuous abuse on social media. She is the author of two novels, "The Gin Drinkers"  and "Blind Faith". 

 She tucks  in  each chapter  a letter addressed to 'Dear Mrs Gandhi' posing ticklish questions none would have dared asked Smt.Gandhi, when she was alive. Two examples-- Why did you impose Emergency, could you not have handled the situation differently, and as suddenly why did you announce elections in 1977, what were the pressures? --Why did you allow Sanjay, your son, to become a hydra-headed monster? .Such a ploy is not exactly amusing and even turns distasteful !.

 Indira’s life is an amalgam of success and tragedy flowing from  fatal flaws in her character which make her truly Shakespearean. Ghose makes us take a relook on an enigmatic person, who has shaped independent India’s destiny, institutions, polity and world view, good, bad, ugly. People  deserve to know much more of an India under Indira, than just the three things commonly associated with her: India’s victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war, the Emergency and her assassination. The book attempts to paint a comprehensive picture of the otherwise enigmatic, often paradoxical, Indira. She was, after all, the living epitome of Goddess Durga, but privately she was meek, insecure and submissive.

 Ghose is outspoken and depicts both  inner strengths as well as weaknesses of Indira. Her contradictions were legendary----arrogant beyond belief but equally beyond belief was her contact with the masses .

 Indira Gandhi can either be praised or derided  depending on how you assess her. She is a Durga and a dictator, a socialist bereft of ideological slant. She at once a secularist and attracted to  religion. She created the Frankenstein’s monster  Bhindranwale, and destroyed him. She had a soft side, too!. Prior to supping with the enemy  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she personally supervised the interiors of his suite.

 Ghose covers all items in Gandhi’s life— the splendour of the Nehrus, the charisma of Jawaharlal, the ‘bewildered misery’ of Kamala, and the rise and fall of Indira. She  graphically brings out the mean pettiness that was ever-present in the Nehru household from Motilal’s time right up to Indira Gandhi’s regime, alongside the grandeur.The condescension with which Indira’s mother Kamala was treated by Nehru’s sisters, especially Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit,her imperious aunt who called her ‘ugly and stupid’. Indira, in turn, nursed a lifelong grudge against her aunt. The sadness of Indira Gandhi’s marriage has been well brought out by Ghose.

 Indira’s success sprang  came from a ‘subtle synthesis of aristocracy and populism’, which guaranteed for her more mass worship than even her father. Gandhi emerges as a redoubtable  leader and Machiavellian politician and also as a woman and an individual. Indira Gandhi is remembered as the Durga who won India its first decisive military victory in centuries and as the dictator who imposed the Emergency and tried to destroy institutions including her own party and the judiciary.

 We applauded her triumph over Pakistan in the 1971 war  and her audacious incorporation of Sikkim into the Indian. We are aware of the forced sterilisation drives during the Emergency initiated by Sanjay Gandhi, the razing of old settlements in Turkman Gate and the humiliation of public servants. We were totally in the know of the fear psychosis that gripped the country over 21 months of the Emergency. Ghose does not shirk from addressing the horrors of the Sikh pogrom of 1984-murder licensed by Rajiv Gandhi and his Congress henchmen.

 Her spectacular return to power after a devastating post Emergency defeat only made her cunningly harsh—peevish, intolerant and cagily suspicious of everyone.

We lived through the terrifying consequences of her fatal promotion of Bhindranwale and the violence that engulfed India for years thereafter. Indira Gandhi ended up undermining and destroying the very institutions that her father had so painstakingly nurtured. In  her earlier years she engineered the dismissal of the democratically elected communist government of Kerala  which became  a black mark on the record of Nehru.

  The problem is of unravelling the truth and myth, half truths and falsehoods. As far as possible, Ghose has put her facts fairly, highlighting Mrs Gandhi’s inner strengths as well as her weaknesses. Ghose does a compelling job of building her narrative and weaves in many charming quotes and anecdotes. There is also sharp analysis, especially in reaching the conclusion that while ‘secular India had been her life’s stated mission’, secular India was also Mrs Gandhi’s ‘greatest failure’.

  Sagarika has to be complimented on her impeccable selection of photographs,especially the one on the Cover Page with a brilliant photo by Raghu Rai,India's greatest photographer. 

Sagarika  has written an eminently readable biography but  deplorably  fallen a slave to enshrine in her book the despicable blabbering  of M.O.Mathai  and Ian Jack about the sexual pecadilloes of Indira Gandhi. Mathai has been given a burial and ought not to have been unearthed.

P.P.Ramachandran

13—08--2017